Colloquium

Michael

Thursday. October 18, 1973. All right, so let me lay out the attendees here and their specialties and affiliations:

  • Dr. Hilary Postel, age 59: specialist in pre-Sumerian Near East, professional affiliation Harvard Semitic Museum

  • Dr. Bryan Peters†, age 63: specialist in History B site archeology/reality shard safety, no current professional affiliation outside of the Project, formerly

  • Dr. Daniel Quarles†, age 35: specialist in History B site archeology in the Americas, formerly of the University of Michigan

  • Bertha Parker Pallan Cody, age 66: archeologist of Abenaki/Seneca descent, Hollywood advisor on Native issues, professional affiliation Casa de Adobe/Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Highland Park, California

  • Maria Reiche, age 70: mathematician, amateur surveyor and archeoastronomer, linguist and translator, archeologist, specialist in the study of the Nazca Lines in Peru; currently self-appointed "guardian of the lines" in Nazca, Peru

Now, none of these individuals other than Hilary were part of ALLOCHTHON before we called them all in; if you remember, the CWG had loosed a meme to get people to not prod at Native American or pre-Columbian connections to the irruptions and so it would make sense they would not want either American specialists or History B archeology experts milling about the operation.

† was present at the Altamont dig in Intermission 1

Rob

(if it doesn't conflict with other scene, Archie will indeed pop into this meeting — but he'll let Hilary run it, which is to say, make you (Mike) do all the work)

Michael

So what Hilary has mocked up on the blackboard in the conference room is a simple two-level chart/grid, with the top row marked "pre-Ontoclysm" and the bottom row marked "post-Ontoclysm." The columns are marked "American cultures," "Mound building," "Cultural technology," "Linguistics?" "Hist-B presence," with extra blank columns included for what else might come of the brainstorming. He's sketched in details for each of the extant columns, simple high-level compare and contrast type stuff. For example, for "Cultural technology," the pre-Ontoclysm square contains "primarily h(unter) & g(atherer)" while the post-Ontoclysm square says, "transition to agri(culture)."

"The proviso here," Hilary says as the participants file in, take out notebooks, etc., "is that most of these suppositions here on the blackboard are going to end up very pat generalizations. We should be aware of individual exceptions. Also please keep in mind we are still gathering, analyzing, and processing field data for some of these questions, but you should see most of the relevant data we have thus far in your briefing packets."

Jeff

"Can I just … ?" Mitch raises his hand. "When we say 'pre-Ontoclysm' and 'post-Ontoclysm,' what do we mean? Did the Ontoclysm happen everywhere, all at once, or was it like most historical shifts, something that started someplace and spread? Quicker in some places, more slowly in others? I've read as much on the topic as I've been able," he says with the autodidactic energy of a man with a high school diploma and Hidden Lore (History-B)-16, "and every time I feel I finish more uncertain than when I started. Sometimes it seems like the Ontoclysm, especially here in the Americas, was a sort of cultural shift. People who had been living one way started living a different way. Other times, seems like what happened was that the pre-Ontoclysm culture was simply erased, left no traces, and a successor state with no particular ties to its predecessor sprang into existence. So, given the limited evidence y'all have to work with, what's the accepted model for the Ontoclysm? To the best of y'all's understanding, what did it look like, here?"

Michael

There are a series of looks around the table at Mitch's icebreaker question, some quizzical, some merely waiting for someone among the colloquium to make the first comment. Quarles kicks things off, addressing Mitch directly. "The majority of Project assumptions about the Event are that the Ontoclysm was an instantaneous global event and that there was no lag-time on its effects geographically. Quite simply, reality and existence on Earth instantaneously changed: a truly global—and perhaps even universal—reality quake." Quarles' expression (and aura) betray that he doesn't think much of that theory.

"There's a minority opinion, though, that the Ontoclysm spread linguistically, that it was passed along like a virus or a meme, and that various barriers—cultural, linguistic, purely geographic—meant that the effect of the Ontoclysm spread unevenly, and over a course of years, perhaps even decades."

Quarles continues, "If we take this minority view, we have to also ask ourselves what the spread and concentration of Enemy population—Anunnaki, the beings we call irruptors, autochronous humans aligned with the Enemy, and so forth—consisted of in pre-Ontoclysm History B. Because if the Enemy didn't colonize every corner of the Earth equally, if they really were concentrated on the Afroeurasian landmass, then there's yet another factor in determining how a gradual, linguistic Ontoclysm might have spread."

At this, Mrs. Cody pipes up. "Yes, of course. But the material record is more difficult to interpret in America because of the lack of written histories and inscriptions. We have only cultic visual traditions and the styles of material objects to go off of. The lack of written language..."

Maria Reiche interjects, "Remember, this is not true of Mesoamerica. Many cultures of the South had syllabaries and written languages, well-attested, from our limited onto-chronological perspective at least, deep into the pre-Ontoclysm period. Are we limiting ourselves to North America here in this discussion?"

Hilary tries to bring some order to the room. "Of course, Maria. We are more concerned with America north of the Aztec Empire today but your expertise on Mesoamerica is welcome."

"I do believe we should be taking a deeper look into linguistics," Hilary says in response. "We have some … tantalizing hints," he says, looking to Mitch and/or Archie for support, "that some Native languages allowed for greater resistance to Enemy memetics, whether by chance of linguistic evolution or some … other factor."

"So many isolates," Reiche says, while nodding soberly. "Like New Guinea."

Jeff

"If we could get a sense of what happened in South America, that could inform our understanding of what happened in North America," Mitch points out. "I mean, obviously, right? But the basic dichotomy is straightforward: either, after the dust cleared, the people who'd lived through it understood that something had happened, or they believed things had always been this way and no specific event took place in or around AD 535. The latter is easier to envision, but maybe the former is more in line with the record, such as it is?"

Michael

Hilary says, "Well, I can tell you the people in Europe only had the vaguest idea that something had happened in the 6th century. There were signs and portents, though. Justinian's plague. The reports of Procopius and Cassiodorus of the sun shining feebly. But did Justinian and Procopius have an inkling that all their tales of ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Babylon were a lie? Would they have even understood what that meant?"

Dr. Peters finally speaks up. "I'm sorry, maybe this is my mistake, but I'm at a loss to understand how any of this is important to the current problem, which I've been told is a dozen subduction zones which opened up in proximity to Native mounds. We know the Project and its predecessors have found reality shards with great frequency in and around Native mounds in the past, which indicates that at some point, these mounds were on the edges of active subduction zones. So that tells me that History B has been present here, and the Indians either built their mounds to mark or protect against these areas of subduction, or that subduction itself retrocreated them."

Mrs. Cody: "The problem, though, Dr. Peters, is that the evidence shows Indians used mounds for both practical and spiritual purposes. Dr. Postel, you have on your chart there that pre-Ontoclysm Adena/Hopewell mounds were largely burial or calendrical mounds, and post-Ontoclysm, the mounds became emblems of the agricultural priest-king-led Mississippian cultures: used for rulership, warfare, and high ceremony."

Hilary: "Some of the mound complexes straddle the line and were utilized 'continuously' across the Ontoclysm but yes. From our temporal vantage point, the older mounds' purposes differ markedly from the younger ones."

Mrs. Cody: "So if you surmise that mound building is a cultural meme, its meaning changed in the face of History B being shoved under History A. The Anunnaki did not rule here, they never ruled here," Mrs. Cody says quite firmly—Mitch can see her aura flare with a combination of determination and pride—"but after the Ontoclysm, something was born in North America... a new way of living, where a tribe would settle in one place, create kings, priesthoods, longhouses, constitutions. It's almost as if the Anunnaki were more dangerous to the pre-Columbian Americans once they became a series of ideas."

Peters: "But ideas still need to travel, Mrs. Cody. If the pre-Columbians were infected by tainted Anunnaki social memetics, someone had to bring them here, no? If we are going by my colleague Dr. Quarles's theory that the Anunnaki never directly ruled humanity here, someone had to travel from the Old World to the New and deliver this payload before Mr. Columbus, no?"

(Rob, Theology (Mormonism)-14)

Jeff

Mitch wants to engage further with the concept of the Annunaki having "become" ideas, like the historical timeline goes [Dec 31, 534: Annunaki real]->[Jan 1, 535: Ontoclysm event]->[Jan 2, 535: Annunaki memes]? But Peters is right, this is tangential to the matter at hand. Mitch's latest attempt to synthesize everything he's experienced and/or been told involves constant, continuous, undetectable retrocreation, and these guys def aren't up for arguing with him about that.

So he bites his tongue and listens.

Rob

Archie sits at the back and is glad he doesn't have to run this meeting.

>> SUCCESS by 8

Brant

Mitch wants to engage further with the concept of the Annunaki having "become" ideas

Body Language-17.

>> SUCCESS by 7

“Language changes. And as it changes, does not our understanding of the things it represents? And if all things are just heuristics, symbols we impose upon the world we cannot see, do the things themselves change? Many ancient peoples believed the sky was a cosmic ocean, a literal, tangible ocean. If the names they gave the sky meant ‘ocean,’ did that make the sky an ocean? We’d say no, of course not, but from their point of view it was true. It was reality. Just like us, here, in this present moment believe — know — that there is no ‘sky’, it’s all just gasses and gravity and empty space. Does that make it true?” Marshall pauses. He’d been standing near the door, a redwell full of folders under one arm. He’s been watching Mitch. “Maybe it’s like that with the Anunnaki.”

Michael

This is the second time on this mission that Archie's been reminded of the Book of Ether. The first time he was tripping on acid and thought he'd found the true Urim and Thummim. But Dr. Peters's comment gets him thinking about the Jaredites again. They escaped the fall of Babel, pleaded with God to not confuse their language, and asked Heavenly Father to scatter them someplace good in the aftermath of Babel. The Lord promised Jared and his people "a land which is choice above all the lands of the earth." And then the Lord had Jared and his people build boats, barges, to take them to this new land of promise.

And the Lord said: Go to work and build, after the manner of barges which ye have hitherto built. And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did go to work, and also his brethren, and built barges after the manner which they had built, according to the instructions of the Lord.

And they were small, and they were light upon the water, even like unto the lightness of a fowl upon the water. And they were built after a manner that they were exceedingly tight, even that they would hold water like unto a dish; and the bottom thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the sides thereof were tight like unto a dish; and the ends thereof were peaked; and the top thereof was tight like unto a dish; and the length thereof was the length of a tree; and the door thereof, when it was shut, was tight like unto a dish.

Archie sketches what one of the Jaredite barges might have looked like from that description. Doesn't that just beat all; it looks just like a... flying saucer.

Marshall's words echo in Archie's ears: "Many ancient people believed the sky was a cosmic ocean... a literal tangible ocean."

Joseph Smith didn't know how to interpret what he'd read in the plates. He thought the Jaredite barges were boats because of course, what else could possibly they be? A flying machine? Of course not.

The Jaredites, of course, eventually went extinct out of wickedness. They squandered Heavenly Father's gifts, engaged in conspiracies and "secret combinations" in defiance of the Lord, and proved as an object lesson to the late Nephites to not do the same. Only the prophet Ether remained in the light of God among the Jaredites, just as Moroni was the last true prophet of the later Nephites, who also fell prey to their conspirators. Right before the Ontoclysm. All this history is happening again, Archie realizes. A holy nation falls prey to secret combinations. That's the way the Anunnaki get in. A conspiracy at the highest levels of rulership.

Hilary picks up from Marshall's interjection. "Well, this brings us to what I feel like is a... well, a decent, moderate hypothesis, one I've been bashing about since going out into the field at Lake Champlain." Bertha takes a great interest in this, given it's the land of both her parents' ancestors. "Let us assume, then, that prior to the Ontoclysm, North America was not directly ruled by the Anunnaki. But let us also assume that there was some presence here, primarily linguistic, perhaps spread by—and I concede this may sound like pseudo-archeology but let me also remind you were are talking about a history that technically never existed as such—human colonists from the Old World."

"These pockets of colonists, tainted by Anunnaki memetics and linguistics, existed in the land for generations prior to the Ontoclysm. Perhaps they were cuckoos in the nest, sent by the šedu to destabilize the inhabitants of the continent. Perhaps they were instead escapees from the prison society the Anunnaki had established in the Old World. Whatever the case, their very presence in the landscape weakened the memetic unity of these pre-Columbian societies, and so the, heh, autochthonous population began building structures to hedge them in, ritually. Much like the Project has done in its stumbling researches into sacred architecture—the Transamerica Pyramid and what have you—these structures—these mounds—were charged with belief energy, often with the bodies of the dead and all the cultural memetic weight that entails. These mounds managed to keep History B linguistics and belief at bay, largely. And then! The Ontoclysm happened."

"To the natives, then, waking from History B, there are these huge mounds, and importantly their purpose is forgotten. As Dr. Redgrave hints, they cannot conceive of their purpose in this new ontological framework; it is lost in the slide from History B to History A. So some of them are turned into giant effigies of deities that emerged from the new history—your Great Serpent, your Underwater Panther. Some are made into stockades, and others into focal points for a kind of... traditional Annunaki civic worship. For you see while the human colonists are physically gone, slid into the sub-history under the real one, some remnant of their linguistic presence has remained, and has infected the natives. Not all of them, of course! Not every tribe or social group by any means. But mostly the Natives who lived near one of these... 12 colonies." Hilary points to the subduction map from Day Zero of ALLOCHTHON. (edited)

Quarles nods assertively. "This matches up with what I've been assuming in Dr. Peters's and my digs in the Americas. You remember the object at Altamont, of course," Quarles says to Peters and Archie. "The Indigo's assumption that it was part of an agricultural installation, processing food in an automated fashion. If you assume that's a contemporary object on the other side, it shows that population density is still extremely low on the American continent. If it's an ancient object from History B, it still suggests an extractive colony."

Maria takes the devil's advocate approach here in response to Hilary and Quarles. "Why so much skullduggery? Why send... 'cuckoos into the nest' as you say? If the Anunnaki had absolute rule over anywhere from three-fifths to four-fifths of the human population—and you have said nothing of China and the Far East, nor Oceania here, and those languages are separated from the bough of Indo-European, but let us assume they and Africa are under the Red Kings' heel anyway—why not just fly your šedu over here or get on boats and take the time to bend every Indian to your rule, instead of needing to wait for linguistic leakage to do it for you over hundreds or thousands of years?"

Hilary says, "Perhaps it is not important to the Anunnaki that they physically rule over the humans of History B. Perhaps it is only important that They are inside their heads. And the small population here seemed not worth a full investment. There are limits to Their power, after all. We've discovered many of those limits in the Project ourselves since the war." (edited)

Jeff

Mitch drops the room temperature on a 15+

>> CRITICAL SUCCESS

Ok all is well temperature-wise

Michael

Mrs. Cody replies to Hilary, "It seems to me, if this hypothesis is true, then the pre-Ontoclysm population of America has a lot to teach us in how to resist the Enemy. But we've not understood it for those some linguistic reasons. And because the Project, up to this point, has seen the mounds' only value as treasure troves full of reality shards, ready to be ransacked for the Greater Good." Bertha's aura flares in righteous anger in Mitch's aura sight; Hilary's aura likewise changes, but to the sickly green of guilt and complicity. Hilary stammers, "Er, yes, well, as fellow archeological professionals, Mrs. Cody, I think we're all embarrassed by the way the Special Assignments Office treated these sites of profound historical and cultural import."

"Embarrassed isn't how I would describe it, personally," Bertha says coolly.

Jeff

"I'm hearing a lot of unstated assumptions about the nature of reality," Mitch mutters out loud.

Michael

All the heads of the archeologists in the room simultaneously turn to Mitch.

Jeff

"It's easy and fun to rehash these questions, and to talk about the 'other side' like if you had the right kind of magic door you could go there..." Having attracted everybody's attention Mitch feels obliged to talk, even if he knows he should have kept quiet. "And that's me being glib and dismissive, because I know I opened the can of worms but we need to circle back around to, as Hil says, these twelve sites and why these subduction zones have stayed open as long as they have." (Mitch nearly said 'stayed open after we shut down the OZY stimulation' but most of these people aren't codeword-OZYMANDIAS cleared.) "And yeah, it's tough given the lack of a clear written record, and it's weird that where in Europe at least a whole history popped into existence, Rome and three surviving Abrahamic religions and all that, but here the context was peeled off leaving the physical sites intact? But as I've been reminded, the past isn't real, it's this story we made up to explain why we're all hanging out in this room right now. We've got to set aside those questions for a hot second and turn our...your collective brainpower to the question of the subduction zone, what these weak spots are, and what's keeping the weak spots weak. I mean, heck, it's weird that these weak spots in our history correspond to sites that were once bulwarks against the Enemy, isn't it? You'd think it'd be the other way around. There's some aspect to it that we're not seeing. Or at least, that I'm not."

I'd like to make some kind of die roll at this point, whether a reaction roll or... Intimidation? Carousing? Fast-Talk to convince the NPCs that Mitch's comments shouldn't be dismissed out of hand?

Michael

(Let me have a look at these skills here. Might just be Hidden Lore but let me have a look.)

I'm gonna give you Hidden Lore (History B) but with your Charisma bonus, that seems to make sense. Hidden Lore (History B)-17.

Jeff

>> SUCCESS by 6

Michael

Well, Mitch certainly has everyone's attention now. Hilary offers the following: "Well, in each of the cases where the zones have been successfully closed," Hilary here is also careful not to necessarily get too deeply into OZYMANDIAS territory, "there has been a physical element of Enemy presence destroyed or disrupted. The two underwater stone circles in Wisconsin and New York," he points to the appropriate spots on the map, "the... installation in West Virginia, and glyph being cut into the foliage in Tennessee. Likewise, in Mississippi there was an Enemy presence in the form of a 'soul trap,' from our mediums' reports. It follows that in Cairo and in Ohio there should be similar presences, not necessarily in the historical record. But our teams have been across all four of the remaining zones with a fine tooth comb at this point and seen no Irruptors, no pragmaclasts, no anomalous structures."

Maria looks at the informational packet the archeologists have received; her packet is open to the photocopied map charting all of the subduction zones and the UFO sightings from last week. "So I am to understand there was a stretch of two nights with... UFO sightings last week?" Maria's aura turns sour considering this. "The verdammt von Danikenites and their UFOs. 'The Nazca Lines could only be seen from the air, therefore they must have been designed by spacemen!'" Maria scoffs. "These lights, these air vehicles... are we to believe they are from History B? Physical intrusions, irruptions? Or is this a mass delusion, a memetic infection?"

Hilary weakly offers that the trusted SANDMAN pilots have made visual contact with the UFOs, that photos have been taken at high altitudes, and that two men in Mississippi have had intimate contact with the beings inside the vehicles.

(I'll leave that there for a bit for Mitch or anyone else to add to.)

Jeff

Mitch's opinion is that "mass delusion" and "physical intrusion" are the same thing seen from different angles and hers is a meaningless question, but, again, he doesn't want to go down the rabbit hole about the nature of reality. He does think that if SANDMAN goes looking for physical manifestations of UFOs that can be shot down and their unknown pilots condemned to a watery grave, then SANDMAN will find them. "Our current understanding is that there are physical manifestations of some kind, yes," he says in support of Hilary.

Michael

"Well then," Maria says. "If the vehicles traveling along this line can be destroyed or dispelled by the Project, then we should. And belief in them is undoubtedly keeping them in the air, so you have begun memetic operations to get people to stop worrying about them, yes?" Maria adds, "If these weak spots are where they are because of ancient belief or fear of the Anunnaki, it will mean that additional measures are necessary to disrupt that belief continue as well. The 'soul traps,' yes? Burial grounds, whether intentional or accidental. Undoubtedly Mrs. Cody's concern about SANDMAN being graverobbers, despite the value of the pragmaclasts found within, is not only valid culturally but also strategically." Bertha says, "Funerary traditions at the time of European contact varied greatly across the continent. But the mound builders—the old ones, all the pre-Ontoclysm evidence such as it is—clearly indicate these peoples were making burial mounds, consistently equipping the dead for a journey, or perhaps even guardianship. And if your... mediums are correct in their communication with the dead, the dead contain belief energy just as sure as the living do. The dead need to be released from any remaining Anunnaki traps."

Rob

Archie points to, or holds up, the most recent map, one that just shows the four remaining subduction zones. "What I'd like to know is, do the four persistent zones have anything in common? Can anyone see any patterns here? Is there anything about the pre-Colombian, or pre-Ontoclysm, populations in these four spots? Anything about the way they treated the dead, any mythic or memetic similiarities? Or... could these all be sites where SANDMAN has retrieved artifacts?"

Michael

"I, er, tried to get pre-SANDMAN records of the reality shard digs, just for the sake of completeness of the data," Hilary says sheepishly. "But Granite Peak weren't forthcoming on that. Reality shard retrieval information requires a level of clearance I don't have." Hilary looks to Quarles and Peters, who are both active shard-hunters. "I do know that there was the now-lost runestone at the Grave Creek complex in West Virginia. The Newark Holy Stone near Point 7. And the psychometric reports from Jocasta of a Project-predecessor organization confiscating a shard at the Kincaid Mounds near Cairo."

Peters says, "I can confirm that pragmaclast retrieval and storage information is at a very high level of clearance, for obvious reasons. Daniel and I just find 'em, classify 'em, and run the cover operation digs. Once we dust them off, the Peak takes over."

Quarles concurs. "We've been brought in, post-dig, to consult with Peak materiel folks at Dugway, but we don't get a lot of information on what happens to the 'clasts once they've been retrieved. I would think storing them all in the same physical location would be tremendously dangerous. But I can tell you we've not done any retrieval ops at the mounds or settlements in question."

On the similarities between the four remaining zones: "The three mound complexes we're looking at along the line," Mrs. Cody says, "Kincaid. Miamisburg. Alligator-Newark. All three originate prior to the Ontoclysm: Adena/Hopewell. All three either are the sites of burial or communing with/honoring the dead. Two out of the three have confirmed pragmaclasts having been retrieved nearby, and it looks like there was an amateur opening of Miamisburg in 1869; who knows what pragmaclasts might have come out of that and were "lost" to history. That's suggestive to me of a link. Whether it's the dead being trapped somehow nearby, or disturbance/retrieval of artifacts, or both."

No one speaks to the lone Georgia site because much like the team who went there did as far as research before arriving, the archeology team doesn't see much suggestive there. The nearest mound complex is Nacoochee Mound. It's further away than the other mound complexes from their subduction zones—60 miles instead of 10-20—but it is also Adena/Hopewell, built right before the Ontoclysm, burials present.

Brant

“To Mitch’s point about the mounds and earthworks not working as anticipated — perhaps that is because they were not intended to protect this history. If they are ontological bulwarks against History B, then they must also serve as ontological bulwarks against History A, since History A is no more a ‘true’ history than any other. Like you said once, Mitch — I’m paraphrasing — History B doesn’t have a monopoly on not existing. It would make sense to me,” he shrugs, “if something created to preserve a history that our history also upended with the Ontoclysm could serve as a beachhead for the Red Kings. After all, the mounds were never meant to protect us from Them.”

Michael

Hilary tamps down his pipe and lights it, takes a puff. "A bit like a gate that swings both ways." He nods, jots down some notes.

Brant

“Or like the — what’s it called? Ah, the Maginot Line. It wasn’t supposed to stop the Dutch from invading France, just the Germans. And yet …”

Leonard

Jocasta, who has been sitting in stony silence, whispers to Marshall in a low hiss.

They chose these spots, right?”, she says, leaving no question as to who that ‘they’ might be.

“So if they chose the spots, they know why. And we can make them tell us.”

Brant

Marshall nods. He shifts his posture in a way that indicates: "yes, but later."

Michael

Hilary says, "A summing-up, then. Our recommendation, then, would seem to be to respect the burial workings of the pre-Columbian Americans who erected these mounds, to attempt to psychically contact and/or release any souls of the dead trapped nearby, and to try to remove any alien architectural intrusions as were seen near Points 5, 6, and 12. The UFOs, if they continue to appear around the line from Points 7, 8, and 9, need to be treated just as if they were alien architecture: destroyed. I'll have the satellite teams begin to sweep the areas around each remaining subduction zone and look for any remaining architecture or artifacts.

Bertha interrupts: "And the reality shards already found at mound sites?"

Hilary: "Yes, well... as you well know, Mrs. Cody, reality shards are de facto indestructible in most cases, so I don't believe removing them from History A as it were will do us much good..."

Bertha: "Not what I'm saying at all. Frankly I think everyone in this organization is far, far too cavalier with playing with the technology of the other side. I've been hit by a couple of glyphs in the time since I flew in from Los Angeles, ones designed by the looks of it by computer. Are you just mass producing these little trinkets of Corruption now, for field agents and operations? And I suspect that shards you say are in storage are also probably getting a workout in the field as well."

Hilary stammers a bit, saying something about the computer-aided glyphs being low-powered, there to keep curious civilians away from the ALLOCHTHON sector of Redstone Arsenal, but Mrs. Cody continues:

"The fact is, you know next to nothing about the origin of the shards you've dug up from these mounds. You make assumptions because of their taint with History B that they were Annunaki artifacts... but what if they weren't, what if they are from the other history but instead were made by the Native people resisting these... Anunnaki colonies? What if the shards were the power source, the very element that kept the Anunnaki at bay?"

Archie's nervous mind again goes to the Book of Ether: "And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of man; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea... And it came to pass that the Lord said unto the brother of Jared: 'And behold, when ye shall come unto me, ye shall write them and shall seal them up, that no one can interpret them; for ye shall write them in a language that they cannot be read. And behold, these two stones will I give unto thee, and ye shall seal them up also with the things which ye shall write.'"

Brant

After Bertha finishes, Marshall makes a note on one of the manila envelopes he’s carrying.

Marshall turns to leave, and subtly taps Jocasta to follow. Once they’re in the hallway, he says in a low tone: “This thing with the reality shards — it’s a theme that keeps coming up. Kate mentioned that our mutual friends thought we were pirating reality shards, back in ‘69, ‘70. Which we weren’t, at least as far as I know. An avenue worth investigating once this is all wrapped up.”

Jeff

Mitch perks up when Hil says that about 'soul traps,' because he's just noticed that none of these boffins look askance at the existence of ghosts, like, at all. The only reason he didn't clock this sooner is that it's harder to notice non-reaction than reaction, but everybody at the colloquium seems to be on board with the 'soul trap' idea, in a way that might be relevant when sussing out the extent to which OZYMANDIAS has compromised SANDMAN as a whole...to the extent that SANDMAN isn't itself inherently compromised in this regard. The bad kind of materialist.

Michael

Mitch also didn't see a flicker of negative emotion (condescension, the aura equivalent of the emoji, etc.) in any of the auras of the four archeologists when the soul/dead talk started up. Bertha seems the most passionate believer in the power of the dead, though, from aura glimpses.

Jeff

Mitch makes a note to tell Marshall that in his expert magician's opinion, the project should be recruiting more Marias and Berthas, preferably people born after the Reichstag fire if not after Hiroshima.

After the Spanish flu epidemic, bare minumum.

Rob

only Boomers can save us

Jeff

Silent generation and up!

Leonard

Jocasta nods in agreement with Marshall. Saying nothing, she flips open a small sketchbook she'd been drawing in towards the end of the colloquium to show she'd been thinking along similar lines, albeit with her usual, well, lack of thematic rigor:

It's a tower, ancient in construction but modern in design, not too far off from what the West Virginia 'satellite dish' that flipped its nature from History A to History B looked like. It's both a tower in the ancient architectural sense and in the modern techonological sense: a radio tower.

Emanating from its pinnacle are cartoon electrical (or mystical?) bolts, and small drawings: one is of random English letters, one Chinese and Japanese characters, some words in pre-colonial native languages, others just random collections of odd shapes, one (pseudo-)Anunnaki gylphs. It is broadcasting all these across the surrounding hills, cities, and plains.

Below the tower is written a different verse from a different scripture: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech...And they said, go to, let us build us a city and a tower...And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."

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